of God as a person is due very largely to the enormous prejudice against
divine personality created by the absurdities of the Christian teaching
and the habitual monopoly of the Christian idea. The picture of Christ
as the Good Shepherd thrusts itself before minds unaccustomed to the
idea that they are lambs. The cross in the twilight bars the way. It is
a novelty and an enormous relief to such people to realise that one may
think of God without being committed to think of either the Father, the
Son, or the Holy Ghost, or of all of them at once. That freedom had not
seemed possible to them. They had been hypnotised and obsessed by the
idea that the Christian God is the only thinkable God. They had heard so
much about that God and so little of any other. With that release their
minds become, as it were, nascent and ready for the coming of God.

Then suddenly, in a little while, in his own time, God comes. This
cardinal experience is an undoubting, immediate sense of God. It is the
attainment of an absolute certainty that one is not alone in oneself.
It is as if one was touched at every point by a being akin to oneself,
sympathetic, beyond measure wiser, steadfast and pure in aim. It is
completer and more intimate, but it is like standing side by side with
and touching someone that we love very dearly and trust completely. It
is as if this being bridged a thousand misunderstandings and brought us
into fellowship with a great multitude of other people. . . .

"Closer he is than breathing, and nearer than hands and feet."

The moment may come while we are alone in the darkness, under the stars,
or while we walk by ourselves or in a crowd, or while we sit and muse.
It may come upon the sinking ship or in the tumult of the battle. There
is no saying when it may not come to us. . . . But after it has come
our lives are changed, God is with us and there is no more doubt of